February 28, 2013

The dog botherers always insist the dog attacks are due to “bad owners”. And that presumptively “good owners” will never have a dog that attacks or kills anyone.

We’ll leave aside their denialism about their own doggy’s noninjurious but threatening behavior and the inherent circularity of their argument for now.

The interesting point is what it takes to be a “good” owner. You have to train and “socialize” the dog. Control it. Keep it in the right circumstances. Train toddlers how to “approach it properly”. Leash it. Lock the gate. Etc. never let down your vigilance for one little second.

What is all of this but a frank admission that these alleged domesticated animals are INHERENTLY dangerous to other citizens? If they weren’t, the only problem would be “bad owners” who actively train the dog to aggress.

UPDATE: naturally there was a Twitter side of the discussion today. I love this. Because when you get one of these dog lurvers on the line, they will quickly make absolutely insane statements. This one was by way of discussing which dogs might represent a threat to a person. @invertenerd opined:

You said maim a toddler, yorkies can and do maim little kids.

Here’s an image (source) that I grabbed off the web for reference. Now, admittedly the Yorkie is an aggressive little Napoleon complex of a dog. Which frankly is why it makes for such a good example. Even with its outsized attitude problem, however, the size of the beast tends to limit the damage. Admittedly in this figure, well…this is the scenario where a kid gets its face bitten, frequently enough. I stipulate that. So if we were talking “disfigure”…mmmm maybe. Arguable. Especially since owners of these little pocket dogs are more likely to be neglectful around kids. But I digress. The main point is how absolutely insane you are if you think that this kind of dog “maims” kids with anything like the same severity or probability that occurs with larger breeds. Insane. And of course that is the point. Dog owners are, to all intents and purposes, insane in their willful denial of what dogs do on a constant basis week in and weekout.

Making the same leap of considering these the “real” investigator initiated awards, we can see that the number of new awards in the past two Fiscal Years is lower than it has been since 95-96, *prior* to the doubling.

Everytime the NIH officialdom chooses to respond to criticism and concern about how their latest initiative will hurt the traditional strength (investigator initiated R01 equivalents) they try to claim that these are not paying the price. In various ways and with various incomplete analyses they try to give the impression that despite the invention of RC this and DP that, the failure to dismantle boondoggle Ps and the increased use of U-mechs…that the R01 remains sacred.

Koop carried out a crusade to end smoking in the United States; his goal had been to do so by 2000. He said cigarettes were as addictive as heroin and cocaine. And he shocked his conservative supporters when he endorsed condoms and sex education to stop the spread of AIDS.

These were both very, very important things for the nation’s top health official to do at the time. Especially when the President himself couldn’t bear to say “AIDS” in public and many people still believed that smoking was just a ‘habit’, that low-tar and filtered cigarettes were safer and that the link to cancer had never been “scientifically proven” anyway.